All4Students.chProject Planning

All4Students
Ultimate Portal for Students.
This document presents All4Student group’s project contents and work plans.
Felix Huguenin-Virchaux, Ulugbek Kamilov, Hamidreza Khadem, Kazim Rehman, Peyman Safarzadeh-Samarghandian, and Achraf Tangui.
1/12/2010

Contents

Project Content

Executive Summary

Service Description

Overview

List of Services

Further developments

Management Team

Marketing

Overview

Market identification

Market Analysis

Porter’s 5 forces framework

SWOT analysis

Marketing strategy

Collaborations and Strategic Partnerships

Implementation Plan

Financing

Opportunities and Risks

Work Accomplished

Background

Work on Portal

Working Methods

Work Plan for the Coming Semester

References

Other materials

Project Content

Executive Summary

All4Student.ch has an ambition to become the principal site visited by students in Switzerland. It aims at providing all relevant information and tips relevant for students, a unique portal that contains information is normally scattered across several other web sites.

The available services of All4Student.ch range from public transport schedules, intelligent calendar designed and adapted for students to support their academic success, accommodation finder, job search tool, night life planner, directory of past internship and exchange reports and tips, previous years exams database sorted and structured to simplify browsing, private tutor hire and search tool, and relevant interesting deal finder.

Additionally the idea of a dating platform for students hosted on the portal is considered.

Unlike current traditional community sites, which lack offers directly targeted to students, and traditional student sites, which lack the community based approach found in many of the Web 2.0 portals like Facebook™, All4Student.ch is designed to keep user informed as well as motivated to contribute and communicate. The idea is to createa reward/bonus system that will push users to become active members of the community.

In a country where the student community counts up to 121’000 people, with only few dedicated sites, we believe there is a room for a new entrant that will focus on meeting the needs of all these consumers.

We plan to develop the site in three languages: English, German, and French. The main reason for this is that in a multi-lingual country like Switzerland language barriers are evidently a problem.According to the Federal Statistical Office (FSO) of Switzerland, foreigners represent almost 22%[1] of the population; hence English was selected to make the portal appealing to them.

Service Description

Overview

This section describes the services that All4Student.ch will hold on its site. A short description of each service is also given.

List of Services

Keeping in mind that we want our users to have easy access to our services and not be overflowed by information we have decided to concentrate ourselves to a number of selected services. A detail of each one of these services is given below.

  • Internship / job offers

This service will have a listing of current internship and job offers on the market.It will be possible for the user to see the offers s by type, field, regionor language they are interested in.
The type of jobs are separated into the following four:

  • Graduate student job
  • Internship
  • Part time job
  • Summer job

The list of fields will be the following:

  • Architecture and Construction
  • Consulting
  • Engineering
  • Finance & Accounting
  • Food
  • Health Care
  • Human Resources
  • IT & Telecommunications
  • Legal
  • Manufacturing
  • Marketing & Communications
  • Operations
  • Research
  • Sales

For the moment we will concentrate on the Swiss market and so the regions will be:

  • German Switzerland
  • French Switzerland
  • Italian Switzerland

The language field will only show the job offers posted in the selected language. Possibilities will be:

  • English
  • German
  • French
  • Italian

Companies will have the choice to limit their offers to certain institutes and faculties so that only registered students of selected institutes and faculties can see them.

  • Study Material

Our survey indicates that a well organized directory of past exams is one of the most important parts of a good student portal. We decided to generalize the concept to include more items.

  • Directory of past exams
  • Class notes
  • Cheat sheets
  • Reports
  • Student Tips
  • Forums

The point of the forum is that students help each other. For example, if a student has doubts about the class he/she wants to takes he/she can post a message on the forum and those students that have experience with that class can give him/her guidance. We plan on dividing the forum into the following discussion boards:

  • Random Talk

Here users can discuss anything which does not fit into the more specific boards.

  • University

Students can use this board to discuss any university related issues. Each university will also have a sub board for its students.

  • UNIL, UNIGE, EPFL, etc.

The university sub boards will give access to further boards related to the different aspects of the university life.

  • Admission

Questions relating admission procedures, experiences, etc. can be discussed here.

  • Campus life

This board can be used to discuss restaurants, shops, upcoming events, etc.

  • Architecture, Civil engineering, etc.

These are the sub boards for all the faculties

  • Job / Internship

Here students can share their experience and talk about things such as how to write a cover letter, get good recommendations, etc.

  • Night life

This board will host talks on the night life scene in the country, upcoming events, concerts, etc.

  • Geneva, Lausanne, Bern, etc.

Discussion on city specific events will be held here. There will also be 4 sub boards to treat specific areas:

  • Ins and Outs
  • Restaurants
  • Bars
  • Clubs
  • Automatic scheduling

This is a calendar which can automatically add the time table of classes on to it given the name of the class. The calendar will be intelligent so that searches can be made by the name of professor or part of the class name. Also all core classes can be automatically added if the student is registered and updates his/her information.

  • Night life

This section will keep the students up to date on what’s happening and where to go. Night clubs, bars, restaurants, etc. can be rated by students and therefore students decide what’s “in” and what’s “hot”.

  • Tutoring

This section will help students find “tutor students” and vice versa. Information that a person registered as a “tutor student” can provide to students looking for one are:

  • Basic profile (name, age, home town, etc.)
  • Current and if applicable previous field of study
  • Current year of study
  • Experience in tutoring
  • Personal availability

To complement the personal information we plan on adding a “tutor” rating system so that students can rate their tutors.

  • Instant tandem

This service will allow users to look for online tandem partners and instantly contact them to have an online conversation using their IM (skype, MSN etc.) account.

We think these services are the most attractive to students. We do however plan on adding additional services if the demands are favorable and if the service is of value to the student community.

Further developments

Additional services that we would like to add in the future upon further market study and user interest are:

  • Good deals

A place where students can share the best deals they have found.

  • Internship and exchange reports

These reports concerning internships and exchange will be submitted by students and will be a source of reference for others. They will be organized and presented in a structured and easily browsable manner just like the past exams.

  • Dating

Here we will have various dating related information such as recommendations, do’s and don’t do’s, etc.

  • Transport time tables

This will give a listing of the timetables of all public transports including night buses.

These services will be studied and eventually launched after the start of the portal.

Management Team

All4Students is a young and dynamic privately held company that offers interesting services

to students. The members are all students from EPFL with a large experience in Computer

-Science, Engineering and Communication Technologies.

Thanks to the good location near the EPFL and UNIL they have ideal access to the target

group and can easily recruit skilled personnel for their future growth.

Technical support can be acquired from EPFL Students and marketing, economic and

management knowledge can be provided by competent UNIL students.

Chief Executive Officer (CEO)

Person XYZ is founder and CEO. He is responsible for the entire operations of the

corporation and reports directly to the chairman and board of directors. His responsibility is

to implement board decisions and initiatives and to maintain the smooth operation of the

firm, with the assistance of senior management. He is also designated as the company's

president and is one of the inside directors on the board.

Chief Operations Officer (COO)

Person UVW is founder and COO. He is responsible for the corporation's operations. He

looks after issues related to marketing, sales, production and personnel. He is more involved

into daily activities while providing feedback to the CEO. The COO is also referred to as a

senior president.

Chief Financial Officer (CFO)

Person UVW founder and CFO. He is reporting directly to the CEO. He is responsible for

analyzing and reviewing financial data, reporting financial performance, preparing budgets

and monitoring expenditures and costs. He presents such information to the board of

directors at regular intervals and also provides this information to shareholders and

regulatory bodies such as the tax authorities. He is also referred to as a senior vice

president. The CFO routinely checks the corporation's financial health and integrity.

Partners of All4Students

Achraf Tangui

/ Achraf Tangui was born in Casablanca, Morocco.
In 2008he received his Bsc. from EPF and since September 2009 he is completing is Master degree at EPFL in Computer Engineering.
He joined All4Students in September 2008 as a project manager and expert in web 2.0 technologies, later performing various functions within the company in the French speaking part of Switzerland.

Hamidreza Khadem:

Peyman Safarzadeh-Samarghandian:

Kazim Rehman:

/ Born in Lahore, Pakistan Kazim has passed most of his life hopping from country to country. He has experienced the life of Islamabad, Tokyo, New York and Geneva.
Currently he is a student in the Swiss Federal University of Technology, Lausanne studying Electrical Engineering as a major and Management in Technology and Entrepreneurship as a minor.
Kazim joined All4Students.ch in September 2009 as a market analyst.

Ulugbek Kamilov:

Felix A. Huguenin

/ Felix A. Huguenin was born in
Winterthur, Switzerland.
In 2004 he received his Bsc. Sc. from ETH
and since September 2009 he is
completing is Master degree at EPFL in
Electrical Engineering. He joined
All4Students in September 2008 as an
Electrical Engineer, later performing
various functions within the company in
the French speaking part of Switzerland.

Marketing

Overview

Market identification

All of the members of All4Student team are currently enrolled in various sections of the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology (EPFL) and the project has started out from our own frustrations with respect to the lack of easy information regarding student opportunities. We felt like much of the practical information aimed at us was scattered across numerous websites on the internet, offices on campus, and student oriented organizations, which makes it difficult to find. Hence the need to create a coherent set of services which would be easily accessible and could provide students with means to succeed with their academic life. The most obvious solution then was to propose an internet portal designed for students, by students.

However, as for any business that aspires to be successful, there comes the need for revenue, and hence the issue of sponsorship. A student website is the perfect place for many companies to advertise their services and appeal to the upcoming work force. Thus, we can divide the consumers of All4Students into two distinct groups: students and partners. From the students perspective All4Students will be a free online tool, where they can find in one place the information which is normally scattered all over the web. From the perspective of the partners we will provide a paid service through which they can reach out to the student population through targeted ads or communications.

It is clear that to be able to attract partners to support our activities financially we will need a solid base of active student users. The main consumers of our services are students residing in Switzerland. As a target group the latter is rather self explanatory. Generally, the age range is between 18-34, there is an almost equal division of sexes, and the student body is distributed evenly among larger cities of Switzerland. However they may be less homogenous when it comes to the type of study, the region in which they study, and whether they are students in a public or private institution.

According to the statistics provided by the University of Lausanne there were a total of 121‘000 students studying in one of the 12 public higher education institutions in Switzerland(Figure 1: Number of Students registered in public universities in Switzerland). Considering the fact that the number is provided only for publicly funded universities, we expect the actual number of students to be much higher.

Figure 1: Number of Students registered in public universities in Switzerland

In order to get a better understanding of this target group, we conducted a survey among students in EPFL. The results of our survey turned out to be insightful. Students.ch the largest student oriented website within Swiss borders claims to have over 110’000 users, both from public and private institutions, but we have found that only 20% of survey respondents use student oriented websites regularly(See Annex). At the same time our findings indicate that approximately 80% of studentswould like to use such website[2]. This demand combined with the lack of suitable offer indicates that there exists a gap, which our website has the opportunity of filling. Moreover the graph of students in Swiss universities above furthermore clearly shows that our pool of potential consumers is steadily increasing.

To wrap up this section we would like to briefly discuss our partners. As discussed above as our user base grows, All4Students will become an attractive place for the marketing campaigns aimed at students. Compared to students, partners form a much more heterogeneous group, which includes all the organizations offering products and services for students or others that are interested in reaching out towards the student population. To use our services, partners will have to get in touch with us through our website. On the website, we will provide contact information for the partners and automatic forms for those interested in standard tasks like placing advertisement banners.

Market Analysis

We used two methods to analyze the market situation: Porter’s 5 forces framework and the SWOT analysis. Whereas the 5 forces framework will focus on the industry the SWOT analysis will focus on the internal and external risks and opportunities.

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All4Students.chProject Planning

Porter’s 5 forces framework

Using this framework we break down the analysis into 5 different elements.

  • Threat of new entrants

There are many factors which make the threat of new entrants fairly high for this market.

Firstly, websites are not economies of scale nor do they require heavy capital investment. A website can initially be started for under CHF 200 a year[3]. However, for a commercially oriented website a company might want to have their own dedicated servers, high bandwidth connections and eventually an office. Though that brings the price up it is still very low compared to any traditional non e-market.

Secondly, even though there might be some proprietary product differences they are not highly differentiable from rival products. Just about all of the free services provided by any website can usually be easily copied by another website or an equally interesting alternative is proposed. For example there are tons of websites today that propose free space to upload photos, videos, documents, emails, etc.

Another factor which pushes the threat of new entrants up,are the almost non-existent switching costs for customers. The users can stop using a website without losing much. Most of the time there is no loss at all for the user.

  • Bargaining power of supplier

The bargaining power of the supplier, which in our case could eventually be the hosting serviceof our website, is very low. There are numerous hosts to choose from and the competition among them is fairly intensive. In Switzerland itself webhosting.info reports 420 hosts and this number goes to 23’823 for the US[4].
The other supplier for our product will be the students themselves as they are expected to contribute to the growth of our portal. Their bargaining power solely depends on how much we motivate them to participate so again it is quite low.

  • Bargaining power of buyers

Once again we can consider two types of buyers. Our main buyers will be the companies which would like to target students and advertise to them through us. Given the number of websites that exist on the internet their bargaining power is high.